Blogroll

EVENTS

In the last post or two the topic was woe is me. To be clear, I’m just an example, there are millions of people who don’t have a site to commiserate on located on the same page as mega blogger traffic grabbers like PZ Myers and Butterflies and Wheels. When I moan and groan I do it secure in the luxury that thousands of people will read it and dozens will offer constructive criticism and encouragement, some even offered money which was quite touching. FWIW, I don’t need money, I have expenses under control. Besides, in a few days I’ll put up my annual bleg, any amount is welcome including single digit bucks. If it adds up to a few hundred when all is said and done I’ll use it to get a new cheapish laptop to replace my limping smoking computers. They’re so old they mostly run in safe mode these days when they work at all. Thinking about how casually I used to buy new electronics got me to thinking about all the things I used to take for granted before unwillingly joining the vast numbers of hard-working poor in the richest country on earth. [Read more…]

A little blast from the past, courtesy of My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. Ahh the memories, the go-go 90s, a raging stock market and full employment, when our biggest worries were Presidential trysts and Princess Di’s wild ride. Have a great weekend my hell-bound peeps!

Go to a website and you will see it. Split a virtual piece of wood and it is there. I’m talking of course about the annoying, omnipresent ads for the search engine Bing, by Microsoft. It/they simply will not leave me alone. I’m sure it’s a fine product, no doubt a great deal of effort and maybe even some love went into it. It’s nothing personal. But I am simply not going to use Bing no matter how much you pester me and that constant pestering is now beginning to irritate me.

Call me stuck in a rut, label me a a closed-minded aging creature of habit, whatevs. But I’m not going to switch unless Google breaks or unless all the techno-kids I work with suddenly start talking Bing up. Neither of those things has happened and the latter would have happened by now if it was going too. Please, MSFT, leave me in peace with one of the few constants I can still count on when using the Internet.

I tried to find the Theodoric of York Medieval Doctor clip from SNL with Steve Martin, where he bleeds every pax that comes in until they are pale and lifeless, to garnish this follow-up on my procedure: I had to be bled. My red and white counts were already lower when I went in than they were in the path report, still high though. One nozzle masquerading as a needle and a couple of days later, I feel fine. I felt pretty loopy all day Monday, less so yesterday. But today I feel surprisingly good. Maybe bleeding every now and then isn’t such a bad idea.

The cells all looked normal. If you’re new here, a blood test last week set off a leukemia/marrow-disease scare. Now I’m told it was probably combo of having above average white counts all the time, and then losing 30 lbs and gaining bone density due to working out like a body Nazi, temporarily kicking up the RBC similar to what happens when you spend a week in the mountains. Bottom line is, I’m probably in the clear and I feel really good. We’ll get back to a more regular blogging schedule this week my friends.

Last week was supposed to be vacation for me, that’s why posting was light. But alas, fate threw me a curve. An AS flare up led to a routine blood test, which came back with some unusual cell counts. We believe we know what’s causing it, and if we’re right it’s easily managed. But there are some other things it could be including pages and pages of freaky rare leukemia and various bone marrow malignancies. The crazy high counts cause everything from autoimmune flare ups — a complication I’m terribly prone to, did happen, and turned the latter half of the week into an intractable nightmare opiate painkillers and gobs of other drugs could barely ease — it also causes the blood to be thicker and stickier, making it harder on organs and veins and posing a significant clotting risk. A person can’t go around untreated with this condition for long without suffering a stroke or an embolism or some serious complication. Not to mention, if I had to spend the rest of my life feeling like I felt Friday, sooner or later I’d have to kill myself. It was miserable. But the meds and bedrest worked, I felt much better by last night.

So first thing Monday morning I’m going to have more specialized tests done, then I am to be bled, like in ye merry old medieval world. It’s a brute force approach to get the counts down, fast. If the tests come back normal as far as how the cells look, no weird hairy filaments around WBCs or deformed/nucleated RBCs, I’m probably in the clear. If not, we’ll go from there.

In all the excitement of another wingnut sociopath slotted for the Republican VP, I almost forgot my big news. I got a raise! It took a year and half to earn, I had to do the work before getting the money, and then it got dragged out for some inexplicable reasons that kept me doing that work without getting the raise for months, big coinkindink I know. But after ranking at number one or number two, time and time again, month after long month, I finally got it! I now officially make right around … [Read more…]

I just got back from visiting with the friend I briefly mentioned earlier. For those of you who didn’t catch it, she was bitten by a brown recluse in two places. These were classic recluse bites, I would say based on what I’ve since read and seen online, there were signs of clear and pronounced envenomation. Like clockwork the bite sites enlarged and burst into widening wounds, by the weekend they were weeping, angry red holes in her flesh almost the size of a silver dollar and on the verge of revealing underlying fascia. She doesn’t have health insurance, she was laid off some time ago, her resources are drying up quickly. There’s not a good time for this to happen, but there is a terrible time and this was it. [Read more…]

What do you rational guys and gals think about political contributions on blog sites? There are advantages and disadvantages obviously. For one thing I don’t ever want readers feeling like they’re just a piggy bank. And it could backfire; opponents of candidates we support might use that support as political ammo against the recipients for taking godless money. There are other concerns as well.

The upside: the reality is I don’t believe we will ever be heard above the din, much less see our political desires even remotely considered, if we individually kick in ten or twenty bucks onto an anonymous webpage. But when I’ve delivered just a few hundred dollars raised from a mere couple of dozen people, that campaign took notice.